Responding to Hogy's post in gripe of the day, I created the "Teachers" topic. Here you can share your experiences about "interesting" teachers you have or may know about. You all probably know about my teacher dilemma already but if you have a story, this is the place to share it!

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 10:13 am

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ReepicheepMaster

Joined: 05 Feb 2008Posts: 7924Location: Sailing into the unknown

My teachers are awesome right now. I have no complaints.

...However, next semester I have my old chemistry teacher-nemesis (the one I wrote about in the gripe thread) once again, so I'm sure I'll be visiting this thread in the not-too-distant future. _________________
Where sky and water meet,
Where the waves grow sweet,
Doubt not, Reepicheep,
To find all you seek,
There is the utter east.

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 3:35 pm

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HogyMaster

Joined: 14 Dec 2011Posts: 951Location: Nar Shaddaa

Well since I seem to be a godfather of this thread I'll post my top three mental cases (not meant as an offense).

University professor; class> Microeconomics:
This guy flunked 60% of the class every first semester, which means he had to re-do his tests. That and about a thousand of letters of complaint drove him into a violent nervous breakdown. I wasn't present when it happened so I can't go into details. He was escorted to the ambulance van by security staff.

University professor; class> Mathematics
This double doctorate dude was probably the smartest guy I will ever meet when it comes to math and physics. He was always cheerful and fun (funny even). He always ended his class by looking twards us, smiled and used this line: "You don't get it? Well sleep on it for a while and I guarantee you it will all make sense." But than this happens:

Tuesday: Comes dressed up in the same clothes he wore a day before (he never did that) minus his jacket and a tie. The cheerfulness in his lecture is gone and he finishes his class with: "See you tomorow." I was thinking he was either partying or maybe even got laid.

Wednesday: Same shirt and pants and he clearly hasn't shave for two days. His lecture was almost depressing and you could barely hear him. He leaves five minutes early mumbling something about coffee.

Thursday: Walks in wearing his pijamas and a bath coat. He walks to his desk, picks up a pen and leaves.

Friday: Dean comes in and informs us that Ms. (lets call her) Smith will be our professor from now on.

I never did learn what had happened to him nor did I ever see him again, but he is still listed as a professor on the University homepage.

High school (substitute) teacher; class> English (first foreign language)
She even looked like a clown with her purple clown hair and her hippie clothes. She was a perfect example of a nevrotic person imo. She did a lot of wierd things but to keep this short I'll just write down the wierdest:
1. Comes a test time, if you just put your name down and write nothing on your test sheet there was a 50% chance you'd get an A or a F. Write something on your test sheet and you wouldn't get an F but you couldn't get an A either.
2. She once bragged to students and her fellow teachers about a new car she bought and drove to work, but than students saw her go home on a bus. When asked about it, she said she forgot where she parked it (this story was told to us by our teachers)
3. This one takes the cake.: She had this orange-red scarf and she was always talking to it, refering to it as, I poodoo you not, my precious.
She was suspended after six months for hitting a student.

I have more (minor) things to post, but will do so another time.

May I suggest that this thread includes good teacher experiences as well. Not all of them are bad. Some of them may actually teach you things without you ever knowing that you are being taught.

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 3:56 pm

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JainaSoloMaster

Joined: 04 Sep 2012Posts: 577Location: In front of my laptop

Hogy wrote:

...my precious...

Ok, we got a Lord of the Rings nut here... No really, that's seriously creepy. Did she do the voice too? If she did I would run out and never come back! _________________We fight, we earn, we never learn. And through it all, the hero falls...
~Heroes, Mika~

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 4:03 pm

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Taral-DLOSMaster

Joined: 23 Nov 2010Posts: 2059Location: Ontario, Canada

In Grade 5, my regular teacher had had a stroke, and so for at least a month we had a substitute. She took the "let's let the kids learn on their own" approach. This led to a few interesting incidents:

1- We convinced her that the teacher always let us work in the hallway (if we were working on group projects and needed a flat space). Several kids took the opportunity to explore the school without supervision.

2- She never gave instructions for homework. She gave us the sheet of questions we were to do, and she told us to bring it back in the morning. One day, nobody knew how to do the math homework (even I, who was by far the best at math in the class). So we all came in without the homework done (I had a note from my mother excusing me from having to do it cause I didn't get it). Response? The teacher cried.

3- At Halloween, two kids decided that it would be fun to pull a prank on her. With the selective use of blood capsules and fake crying, they convinced her that one kid had beat the crap out of another. She cried after the revelation that it was a joke.

Of course, she was not much worse than the teacher she replaced. The original teacher had a penalty system of "nuages" (clouds). There was a corkboard with everyone's name on it, and five smiley-faces pinned next to them. If you misbehaved seriously enough, one smiley-face got flipped over (the other side was black or grey, as if the smiley was blocked by a cloud). But the penalty didn't actually mean anything. If you had 2-3 clouds, you were not allowed to participate in a prize-for-good-behavior thing at the end of the week. 4-5 clouds meant your parents got called, but even with the bad eggs that rarely happened.

He also took a lot of time every day for Religious celebration (this was a Catholic school, so whatever). But he was really awful about it. He once asked me not to sing the hymns because my singing voice was bad (word to the wise: you want to promote Christianity among kids, don't tell them not to participate because they suck.)

More stories another time. There are plenty. Including some that directly stem from being non-French and non-Catholic (but still Christian) at a French Catholic school._________________http://taralbooks.blogspot.ca

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 4:27 pm

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HogyMaster

Joined: 14 Dec 2011Posts: 951Location: Nar Shaddaa

Jaina you must understand that there were no LOTR movies back then and only a couple of us have read the book(s). So the tone she used calling It precious was irrelevant (it was almost calm and warm like: "My dear, my precious <kiss>"). It was creepy nonetheless.

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 4:29 pm

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Salaris VornModerator

Joined: 02 Feb 2008Posts: 2373Location: New York, USA

Taral-DLOS wrote:

He also took a lot of time every day for Religious celebration (this was a Catholic school, so whatever). But he was really awful about it. He once asked me not to sing the hymns because my singing voice was bad (word to the wise: you want to promote Christianity among kids, don't tell them not to participate because they suck.)

This reminded me of my 9th Grade English teacher (pulic school). He'd wanted to be a Catholic priest but for whatever reason became an English teacher instead (my guess is he washed out of Seminary school cause being an English teacher was clearly not what he had wanted to do with his life).

Anyway sometime in the fall, roughly when you typically would have things like harvest festivals, he wishes us a happy weekend and mentions a bit about celebrating the fall as pagans would. Now here's where he kinda got insulting: he thought pagans celebrate the fall by 1) stripping to their waste 2) lighting a candle in their yard 3) assembling a collection of pots/pans and 4) dancing/hollering/pracing around the candle while banging on the pots/pans (the description of the behavior painted a picture of someone who is not entirely mentally stable).

Another time he handed out an 1 page "outline" for our term paper and told us that next week we should come back with an outline for our project following the model of the handout. Me and my best friend did exactly that, a 1 page bulleted outline just like the handout and got Cs on them. He actually DIDN'T want it to look exactly like the 1 page bulleted outline he handed out, he wanted an "outline" roughly half the length of the term paper but no where had his instructions said so.

My 10th Grade German teacher was a crazy coffee adict (like someone with ADD with two cups of expresso crazy). She had a somewhat disturbing obession with Brad Pitt and at least once a week would show the entire class, in a somewhat drooling fashion, her two pocket folder with a picture of a shirtless Brad Pitt. Now I don't mind women noticing cute guys or fantasizing about them or whatever but she bordered on the "too much information" part of the spectrum.

And just the bit about Gollum: I have a friend who, I kid you not, cannot only perfectly mimic Gollum's voice from the films but he has also perfected scampering around the floor exactly like Gollum and crouching the exact same way._________________

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 5:25 pm

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HogyMaster

Joined: 14 Dec 2011Posts: 951Location: Nar Shaddaa

Salaris Vorn wrote:

This reminded me of my 9th Grade English teacher (pulic school). He'd wanted to be a Catholic priest but for whatever reason became an English teacher instead (my guess is he washed out of Seminary school cause being an English teacher was clearly not what he had wanted to do with his life).

Maybe he was just not into the whole celibacy thing:) I know I couldn't bring myself to handle that.

Salaris Vorn wrote:

My 10th Grade German teacher was a crazy coffee adict (like someone with ADD with two cups of expresso crazy).

German teachers are just like that I think. Had one just like that. She didn't drool over no Star though.

I have a very fond memory of my seventh grade english teacher. Now she was a really good teacher. She even won an award for her teaching method for being the best english teacher in the country!
She doesn't teach like normal regular teachers who just drills the stuff into you and expects you to pass. No, she teaches you all these little rhymes and songs to remember all the ways for doing present perfect tense or the active and passive voice. And with reported speech she took the tallest kid in the class ans waltzed around the room with him while chanting: "Present tense becomes past tense, and past tense becomes past perfect."
We will never forget her! And the thing that everyone will always remember about her is her famous line: "Don't hold the book so close to your nose! I call it Wimbledon reading!"
Wow, she will always be my favorite teacher ever. _________________We fight, we earn, we never learn. And through it all, the hero falls...
~Heroes, Mika~

Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2013 8:25 am

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Taral-DLOSMaster

Joined: 23 Nov 2010Posts: 2059Location: Ontario, Canada

My sixth grade teacher had this thing he instituted called "La Conseil de Cooperation" (Cooperation Council). It effectively gave every student the power to enforce classroom rules and issue punishments.

This was bad for two reasons. One, you shouldn't give 11-12-year-olds the power to punish their peers for rule infractions, and two, you shouldn't force those rules (and others) to apply 100% of the time (e.g. recess).

As part of the Council, he refused to let us do separate things during recess. The entire class had to play something together. This was terrible because a) we didn't all like each other that much and b) I for one didn't care for sports and that's what was played. I see the logic of wanting to prevent kids from devolving into cliques, but it was too much. I just wanted to hang out and talk with my (mostly girl) friends.

He also required The Cooperation Council to meet every Friday to discuss problems with enforcing classroom rules. One student might put on the bulletin board "I criticize X because I caught him speaking English at recess and told him he had to clean my desk as punishment and he didn't do it." This led to bad feelings between students.

As a last point, this was the teacher that taught us sex ed. He was WAAAAAY too into it. He was making dirty jokes, drawing penises on the chalkboard. I recall some teacher-driven mockery when my voice broke (only a few weeks after learning that boys' voices break around that time). Not cool.

He was supportive though. I represented the school at a competitive dictation challenge, and he came to support me. That was nice._________________http://taralbooks.blogspot.ca

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2013 8:26 am

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UltimatedashKnight

Joined: 20 Jun 2012Posts: 128

My geometry teacher was probably the most memorable to me. He was a former marine, and made sure we knew it! He was actually really chill though, and on the days we actually did have class, he knew how to make it interesting. He related angles to snipers bullet and intersecting lines to a battle zone (complete with stick figures dying and sound affects) and one time took us outside and went and drew all over another teachers tires to teach a concept! Good times, good times.